Reel Toronto: Ararat

Toronto’s extensive work on the silver screen reveals that, while we have the chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow, the disguise doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny. Reel Toronto revels in digging up and displaying the films that attempt to mask, hide, or—in rare cases—proudly display our city.

Atom Egoyan is one of our great filmmakers, but lordy, he can be inconsistent. Sometimes, he does something undeniably brilliant, like Exotica or The Sweet Hereafter. Sometimes, he does something ambitious that doesn’t quite get there, like Chloe. Sometimes, he puts out a movie, and you don’t even know it came out. And sometimes he just makes a mess. Which one is Ararat? Well, it’s obviously supposed to be a very personal and ambitious piece about history and art and truth and fiction and, in particular, the Armenian genocide. And somehow it all just becomes a cold, muddled mess. Even Roger Ebert, a big fan of Egoyan’s, barely mustered a 2.5-star review.

So, Ararat is essentially composed of a few levels of reality that gradually come together and overlap. The first involves a movie being made about the Armenian genocide. It obviously and purposefully takes place on constructed sets…

…but occasionally we go outside and find ourselves at an actual film studio…

One extensive sequence takes place at the Art Gallery of Ontario, providing an opportunity to remember its pre-Gehry appearance. Walker Court…

…looks about the same, minus its new staircase, anyway…

…and even the main entrance isn’t entirely unfamiliar…

…but the bookshop looks pretty different now…

…and, hey, we can see a streetcar going by out on Dundas.

Yep, that’s French legend Charles Aznavour in that Walker Court shot…and when you consider people like Eric Bogosian and Bruce Greenwood are also in the mix, you can see that a weak cast is not one of the problems here.

Here Elias Koteas and David Alpay take a little drive in the west end.

As we said, even if it’s not the most watchable Egoyan film, there’s too much thought and artistry evident in Ararat to call it a disaster. Indeed, though Wikipedia helpfully notes it was “given only a limited release in most countries, and failed to make a significant gross at the box office,” it did win several Genie Awards, including Best Picture. A decade later, perhaps it’s worth revisiting.